Ten years into it, what are we to make of the Afghan War?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

See Patrick Porter at The Duck of Minerva, one of my favourite foreign policy blogs, who has an overview of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the terrible that has resulted from that seemingly endless war. He concludes:

[T]he most profound significance of the invasion is that it led to the war in Iraq. Because America quickly overthrew the Taliban in a country infamous for being the 'graveyard of empires', this gave false confidence to the Bush II Administration, which concluded that it could do the same thing against the easy target of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Thus Afghanistan was the catalyst for a greater disaster in the Gulf, which in turn accelerated the erosion of American power in the world.

Including the erosion of American soft power, it must be added, its credibility, moral standing, and diplomatic clout. Obama has done much to try to reverse that erosion, but he has hardly been the sort of progressive world leader some of us hoped he might be, and so, ten years after the war began, the U.S. remains in Afghanistan, caught in an unwinnable struggle to achieve vague and ever-shifting objectives.

Yes, the brutal Taliban regime was "toppled," yes, life was made "more dangerous and insecure for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, yes, the effort to "transform Afghanistan into a strong, centrally-governed democracy" hasn't been entirely a failure (and certainly requires a great deal of time)...

But at a cost that, it would seem, is significantly greater than the meager benefits.